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I do feel like life is just too short to read bad books...'bad' being defined not as 'worthless', but as 'i'm just not into this right now and may never be'. I don't feel obligated to press on unless I have some specific commitment to the book because it was a gift or I promised a review. Even then sometimes I cannot press on. Reading is and always should be a pleasure (unless one is in school or has work reading) and forcing oneself to do something that should be pleasurable just seems wrong.

I generally stop reading if I don't like the book. The only exception was the His Dark Materials trilogy - I wanted to give up after the second chapter of the first book - but I plowed through so I could at least say I read it when confronting people (I was surprised at the amount of vitriol coming from my own religion towards it - vitriol I think is completely unwarrented). Which was a pity, because I enjoyed the movie The Golden Compass - which should have included the final scene from the book.

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